Seven things you didn’t know the United States and its allies did to Iran

Not only have the U.S. and our allies done horrendous things to Iran, we’re not even polite enough to remember it.

The founder of Reuters purchased Iran in 1872 — Lord Curzon called it “the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of.”

The BBC lent a hand to the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh — Soon enough the U.S. was training the regime’s secret police in how to interrogate Iranians with methods a CIA analyst said were “based on German torture techniques from World War II.”

We had extensive plans to use nuclear weapons in Iran — If the Soviets began massing their troops, we would use small nuclear weapons to destroy the mountain passes in northern Iran the Soviets needed to move their troops into the country.

We were cool with Saudi Arabia giving Saddam $5 billion to build nukes during the Iran-Iraq war — …and the Reagan administration knew all about it and didn’t care.

We shot down a civilian Iranian airliner — killing 290 people, including 66 children — Two years later the U.S. Navy gave the Vincennes’s commander the highly prestigious Legion of Merit commendation.

We worry about Iranian nukes because they would deter our own military strikes — This perspective — that we must prevent other countries from being able to deter us from waging war — is a bedrock belief of the U.S. establishment, and in fact was touted as a major reason to invade Iraq.